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This article is provided by Gary Zandstra.com. If you’re a minister of music, a pastor of programming, a senior pastor, or even a volunteer then one of your responsibilities involves dealing with the technical aspects of worship. Technical, of course, meaning sound, theatrical lighting, video, props, production. These areas, when properly applied, can add great dimension to the worship experience. However these elements misapplied can destroy a worship experience. Nothing is more distracting than feedback, missed cues or “hokey”…
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Article provided by Home Studio Corner. Telling an audio engineer to listen is like telling a doctor to heal. Of course we’re going to listen! How else do we get a great-sounding recording? You’re good at listening to the music, but how well do you listen to the artist? I produced an album for a really talented singer-songwriter named Whitney Winkler in which she asked me to play acoustic guitar on the project. Once we had the guitar and…
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This article is provided by Audio Geek Zine. Recently I asked my Twitter followers to complete and RT the phrase “You’re not a real audio engineer until you’ve ____” It was a lot of fun to see the replies. I didn’t really expect serious answers. theaudiogeek: You’re not a real audio engineer until you’ve made your own cables. timgosden: You’re not a real audio engineer until you’ve become a coffee snob. SmallRoomStudio: You’re not a real audio engineer until…
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Every time the number of open or active microphones in your church system increases, the system gain (or volume) also increases. The effect of this is greater potential for feedback as more microphones are added, just as if the master volume control were being turned up. In addition, unwanted background noise increases with the number of open microphones. Here, the effect is a loss of intelligibility as the background noise level rises closer to the level of the desired sound.…
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Festivals always serve to teach new tricks to even the most experienced of sound professionals among us, as I learn every year when setting up microphones and mixing sound for the annual Elkhart Jazz Festival. Over a three-day weekend and joined by my colleagues Mark Darnell and Dave Engstrom, we handle all sound duties for 16 performances at the historic Elco Theater in downtown Elkhart, Indiana. Artists range from 1920s-style orchestras to “modern jazz” combos. Over the years we’ve had…
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This article is provided by Gary Zandstra.com. In 1965, the Beatles took the world by storm with a stadium tour using unbelievably minuscule PA systems, usually headed by five-input, rotary-pot tube mixers most likely bearing the Altec Lansing brand. (And the band’s 30-watt instrument amplifiers were often louder than the PA, which is why we hear more screaming girls than music on many of those early recordings.) What followed rather rapidly, and in fact, was spurred at least in…
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Face it, stuff happens. Sooner or later something stops working during a show. Front of house engineers must know the absolute essential components of the sound mix that are most vital – in other words, the channels that the band must absolutely have to continue playing. Generally, for a four-piece rock band in a large venue, these channels are kick, bass, guitar, and lead vocal. Just four inputs, everything else is pretty much fluff and spares. A bit extreme? Perhaps,…
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Provided by HOW To Church Sound Workshops. Important lessons can often be learned while doing humble tasks — lessons that can later apply to everything else in your life. So it was with my 19 year-old son Alan’s Honda Civic. He had received it the year before, and while it ran pretty well, there was a nagging engine miss at idle. He pretty much worked around it, slipping the automatic transmission into Neutral at stoplights so it wouldn’t shake itself…
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This article is provided by ChurchTechArts. A while back I wrote a post on virtual sound check. Simply put, virtual sound check is a mechanism for capturing the inputs to your board as close to right after the mic pre as possible, then being able to easily play that back, in the same inputs as the real band. Digital consoles have made this process relatively easy, though the exact implementations vary. The other day I was asked to recommend…
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The device commonly referred to as a “speaker” is more correctly referred to as a loudspeaker system. It is comprised of some transducers, a crossover network, an enclosure, and a few additional parts. Loudspeaker system designers must be familiar with the complicated interactions of the components that form the system. An assemblage of good parts does not guarantee a good system. (Note: For the remainder of this article I will refer to a loudspeaker system as simply a “loudspeaker.”)…
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